This paper examines the history of the print editions and
the online edition of Philip
Sidney's early pageant known as "The Lady of May." Electronic image
scans of pages from print
editions are iconically compared with the same text as typed into a
computer and as coded in
increasingly complex HTML code, culminating in an interactive
presentation with online
helps. This examination will seek an answer to the following question:
Will traditional book
arts continue to influence text design in the online world?

Keywords: Etext, HTML, Internet, Markup, World Wide Web, Design

Suzi Gablik in The Reenchantment of Art (5)
reminds us that for
some time now the focus of art has been on the individual acting alone,
defying the gods[1], defying society. Even the
reaction to this ethos in what has been called
postmodernism retains this disconnectedness, or rather extends it, by
proposing nihilism, the
death that is final because it is individual death, denying to society
the locus of what is to be
called life (40). In literature this
disconnectedness has been possible
only through cognitive dissonance, for every act of publication is an
act of making public, of
making to the world the gift of the textual object, and publication has
generally been a team
effort in any case, as it is a complex maneuver: author, editor,
publisher, designer, printer and
distributor have all been required. The Internet seems to offer a new
field for the play of
individualism in publication, yet it is the most communal medium (Leppert 7) yet devised, as the give-and- take of
communication between
authors and readers becomes what is known as a "thread" or single
intertwining
strand of textuality. Where there is community, there is tradition,
that glue of temporally
conditioned expectations by which the community maintains itself
through the present into
the future. Traditions in text design are migrating from other media to
the Internet. This
paper will examine the possibility that tradition will continue to
influence design in the new
medium, helping to orient readers to the text at hand.

Among the many texts appearing online are those which have
appeared before in print and
hold enough attraction for generations of readers to have become what
are called classics. As
the Internet grows, questions arise as to how best to represent classic
texts online. Some, of
whom Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg (Neuman, 365)
is the
best known, have advocated using "pure vanilla" ASCII code, the lowest
common
denominator of text encoding, so that no one need be left behind while
those having more
buying power move on to more expensive and complex systems. Others feel
no effort should
be spared in marking up texts for research, which may require a more
sophisticated
technology to use, but offers the best chance of producing new
knowledge. In the forefront of
this movement are the proponents of TEI, the Text Encoding Initiative (Neuman, 367). TEI is an implementation of the
capabilities of the
Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), a coding scheme that
permits in-depth
analysis of the parts of a text. SGML is currently the best approach
for providing scholarly
electronic editions to those few scholars doing computer-based analyses
of texts, but it is ill
suited to the production of popular editions. Fortunately, there is a
middle way between these
extremes, offering much of the simplicity of ASCII with a glimpse of
the power of SGML:
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). HTML is a subset of SGML designed
for transportation
of hyperlinked documents, graphics, sound files, and motion pictures
via a network such as
the Internet. Users who have never otherwise attempted computer
programming have
discovered the ease of working in HTML. There are now more than fifty
million
Web-accessible documents (HotBot), of which over
five thousand
are classic texts traditionally presented in codex book form, ranging
from Homer's Odyssey to James Joyce's Ulysses(Ockerbloom).

With software of a new type called a web browser, one can now
consult a rapidly expanding library of texts in ways not possible
previously. A text-only browser such as LYNX, when combined with speech
software, can read online text to a visually impaired user. Browsers
have search capability, so that each instance of a given word or phrase
in a given work may be located and studied in context; every online
edition is thus also a concordance. Selected portions of longer works
in the public domain such as an act of "Hamlet" or chapter of Lord
Jim can easily be downloaded, reformatted, printed out and used in
class packets. Thus, although text read from a monitor is not as
legible as from paper, electronic text is useful enough to drive a
movement to provide such access. As noted above, however, there is
disagreement on how to do this.

At Cornell University, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere (McClung), experiments are going forward in
presenting the original pages
of classic print editions in electronic facsimile, much as has been
done through microfilm
technology. Such images may contain visual information, such as
marginalia in the
handwriting of previous owners of the scanned print copy, which cannot
be effectively
presented by SGML or HTML, but have their own drawbacks. A single page
scan takes from
ten to a hundred times as much memory as stored text, and is
accordingly slow to transport
over a network. Also, an image does not easily support text searches,
though dual editions are
planned that will do so. For the time being, then, for networked
access, SGML offers the best
choice for a scholarly edition, ASCII is still suitable for a popular
edition, and HTML, with its
increasingly diverse options for presentation design, offers a solution
for teaching
editions.

At the University of Oregon I am experimenting with design of
etexts suitable for teaching
use. They are of varying length and complexity, from Philip Sidney's
pageant known as
"The Lady of May" (Sidney) to Edmund Spenser's
epic Faerie Queene(Spenser). As
techniques
become available,
they are tested first on shorter works, and then, if proven useful,
applied to longer ones.
"The Lady of May" is a handy test bed. In effect a one-act play, it
contains a variety
of design elements. It also interests students of literature and
history, as it contains decent
poetry and was performed before Queen Elizabeth I, whose presence was
material to the
progress of its plot.

"The Lady of May," performed in 1578, would perhaps have been lost
to posterity
but for the fame of its young author, killed at Zutphen in 1586.
Interest in his writings
remained strong throughout the 1590's, and a version of the pageant was
accordingly
appended to the 1598 edition of the Arcadia. A facsimile of the
first page (figure 1) shows the style of
printing of the time (Colaianne 570). The
iconographic conventions of the page are, despite the
intervening centuries, largely familiar to us and would also have been
familiar to medieval
scribes. The header or title is long by our standards but presents the
sixteenth century
compositor with an opportunity to set centered lines of descending type
size and length, a
usually pleasing effect harking back to manuscript book design. Also of
venerable origin is the
ornate initial letter at the head of the main matter of the text. Some
of the conventions have
been abandoned in the centuries since: here, "j" is not yet in general
use, and is
still represented with "i", use of "u" for "v" within words,
or use of "v" for "u" at the beginning of words, is still common.
Spelling is richly variable: "reape," "sweete," "formallie."
Note also the convention of printing verse in italic. Throughout much
of the history of text,
as here, economics does battle with legibility for the upper hand in
design: for legibility, white
paper and black ink serve to produce sufficient contrast to distinguish
type easily, and type
design has improved over the black letter ("gothic" type) in common use
a few
decades earlier. On the other hand, economics has led to the use of
smaller type sizes (figure 1 is reduced from a
large folio page, but even for a folio the types
are relatively small) than formerly, and little white space is left
between the blocks of text. The
wide margins (not shown) are a product more of technological than
aesthetic considerations:
the presses could not produce more than four folio pages per
impression, so these had to be
grouped together in a rectangular pattern near the center of the sheet
to facilitate consistent
printing from the available hand-operated platen lever. When folded and
sewn, the folios
show a text-page closer to the gutter than to the outside of the page,
and closer to the top than
to the bottom. Over the years, as printing technology has changed from
hand platen presses to
mechanically driven rotary presses and on to photo-offset lithography,
the technical
requirement for traditional page placement has been rendered obsolete,
yet the tradition itself
has force and non-traditional designs, while offering a momentary
exhilaration of freedom,
generally have become quickly dated, while the old standard page
remains. This may be due
to what George Landow calls the "rhetoric of arrival" and the "rhetoric
of
departure" (82). Communication depends for
success on the
relative absence of elements that have little or nothing to do with the
idea to be
communicated; standardization of textual elements, from grammar and
style to the use of
titles, headings, running heads, and folio numbers is intended to
reduce the energy expended
by the reader in extracting information from the page (Carlson 62).
Serious deviations from tradition pose problems for the reader. Our
text in figure 1 is four centuries old, yet
we know our way around in it; it is
familiar territory and we know where to enter and where to exit.

Figure 2 shows the opening page of "The
Lady of
May" in a copy of The/Miscellaneous Works/of Sir Philip Sidney,
knt./With A life
of the Author and Illustrative Notes/By William Gray, Esq./Of Magdalen
College, and the
Inner Temple, dated 1860 (Gray, 265). The
rhetoric of scholarship
in the nineteenth century frequently called for florid titles and
titled editors. Editing required
editing; the effects of Mr. Gray's heavy hand can be seen throughout.
Note the updated
spelling on the page and the changed punctuation, especially the
exclamation points. The
passage used in the Renaissance for a title has been dropped into an
introductory note in
six-point type, and a new title, which has come into usage in the
intervening years, is offered
without explanation. The archaism of the piece is marked by its being
given an ornate
dropped initial, as before, and a headpiece, a device which was used in
Sidney's time though
the folio edition of our text lacks one. The editor seeks throughout to
locate and isolate the
narrator's voice in small type, giving to the text more of the
conventions of a play-book than
its original warrants. These changes might loom large in the mind of an
editor, but to the
average reader, not much has happened to the text. Page design basics
have not really been
tampered with. The compositor in the shop which produced this artifact
lived by much the
same rules as those who produced the 1598 edition.The technology also
remains relatively
little changed after 262 years: the book is laboriously composed in
hand-set types as before,
though the press is probably a rotary press powered by steam, using
stereotype plates produced
from the galleys of type, an economical advance in book production.

Figure 3 shows a Cambridge University
Press edition from 1962 (Feuillerat); 102
more years have passed,
and editorial
conventions have changed, albeit very slowly. This is actually the
Feuillerat edition of 1912.
The publishers caution that he had not the best copy texts or
manuscripts available, yet
reprint his assertion that "the text is reproduced without any
deviations from the
originals in the matter of spelling or punctuation." The page before us
shows that much
of the spelling and punctuation has in fact been restored, though the
sixteenth century usage
of "u" for "v" within words, "v" for "u" at the
beginnings of words, and of "i" for "j" throughout, have not.
Feuillerat is uncomfortable with the late title of "The Lady of May"
but evidently
feels it must be included, and so it appears here within square
brackets, and as a running
head. This shows that by 1912 the instability of text (McGann
182)
has been noted, and editorial practices instituted to stem the flow of
blood, so to speak. The
first three lines of the Renaissance "title" have been restored,
centered, in
descending type sizes, perhaps as a bit of archaism to set the mood,
but the rest have been
moved into page-width justified text, as if they were the beginning of
the main matter. The
main matter is still signified, however, by the use of a dropped
initial--no longer ornate, but
simply a larger type size of the same font. Gone is the headpiece, and
the entire design has
been constructed from a single typeface in various sizes depending upon
usage. Although it
does not show here, this is a scholarly edition in that variants have
been recorded; they are
appended at the end, by page number and by line number on the page.

The printing technology in use here is offset lithography, albeit
from plates photographed
from the edition of 1912, which was composed on the Monotype machine,
with titles set by
hand, and printed by letterpress from stereotypes as in 1860. That they
have reprinted, with
only their own preface and a bit of his, the entire 1912 edition is a
sign that the overall book
plan, page design, and type style are deemed adequate for a new
printing after fifty years! The
agreements on arrivals and departures made centuries ago between those
responsible for
producing texts and those who read them still hold true, even as
lithography makes possible
complete freedom in page design.

Lithography gives a blacker, more uniform letter, and is the
technology of choice for conversion by
scanning; Figure 3 yields a more legible
image than Figure 2, and would produce fewer
errors for OCR (Optical Character
Recognition) scanning. Lithographic printing arrived in time to
facilitate the wholesale conversion
of canonical works into electronic texts and enable the use of new
computer technology in
humanities research. But just as technology has made conversion
possible without the labor of
retyping, so that new editions could be prepared whenever new
scholarship became available, the
very text pages that would support such conversion are frequently
unavailable for this use, because
they are still under copyright. Copyright, or text ownership, depends
on when (and where) the text
in question was authored: in the United States, if it was published,
the copyright expires 75 years
from the date of publication (if the copyright has been renewed) if
authored before 1978. If authored
after January 1, 1978, the author-owned copyright will last the life of
the author, plus 50 years, or if
owned by a publisher, 75 years from the date of publication, or 100
years from the date of creation,
whichever comes first (Benedict). Nineteenth
century editions are very
unlikely to have copyright problems, and for this reason are frequently
found among the
conversions that have appeared on the Web, like the Jowett translations
of Plato (Ockerbloom). If you wish to work
from editions earlier than the nineteenth
century, OCR becomes inefficient due to the older typefaces,
irregularities in printing and stains on
pages, etc. It may be necessary to type. This is the method used in
converting "The Lady of
May."

Figure 4 shows the first of my efforts
to introduce "The
Lady of May" to the computer age. This etext edition, produced in 1993
as a term paper
for Dr. Lyell Asher at the University of Oregon, derives from the
British Museum copy
(Catalogue # C.39.h.8) of the 1605 edition of the Arcadia, pps.
570-576. Long "s" has
been modernized, largely because it is unavailable for ASCII anyway
(!!), and catchwords and
marginalia have been removed. Sixteenth/seventeenth century usage of
"i" for
"j" and of "u" and "v" has been retained, along with the
original spelling. A few errors have been emended within brackets. Many
italics, such as
those used for proper names, have been omitted. Endnotes are indicated
within braces. These
are editorial decisions that are relatively little influenced by the
medium at this point, because
this is not a hypertext edition, nor is it in one of the formats
determined by the visual
iconography of desktop publishing, such as TEX or Postscript. This is
Michael Hart's
"pure vanilla ASCII," the basic character set devised originally for
the 8-bit
computers of the 1960's and 1970's. Aesthetically speaking, this is a
bit of a step backward.
Depending on the monitor available (mine had yellow characters on a
black background) the
viewer would see generally eighty columns by twenty-four lines of a
fixed width font
resembling Courier. Visually, the text of figure
4 is not at all as
attractive as the print editions of the previous three hundred ninety
five years. Yet it
represents a significant advance. Anyone can now take up a floppy disk
containing the file
"may.txt" and do a wide variety of things with it. Even the simplest
word
processors can do word counts, character counts, and what are called
"string searches," in
which a set of characters can be located successively in each of the
contexts in which it occurs.
This was the primary use envisioned by the creator of the original
etext, Roberto Busa,
working in the 1950's on St. Thomas Aquinas (Raben
343).
Concordancing and linguistic software can do even more, and the file
can also be converted
into practically any format that has been or is yet to be invented,
including typesetting for
paper book production.

"May.txt" was not typed from the edition of 1860, as that edition
seemed to me to
have taken too many liberties with the text. Nor was it typed from the
edition of 1598, partly
because I was unaware, through faulty scholarship (!!), of its
existence, and partly because it
was unavailable to me at the time anyway; the 1605 edition was
available on microfilm, and I
worked directly from photocopies. It was impossible for me to produce a
truly scholarly
edition, as I had no resources for comparing early editions, let alone
copy-texts, on my own;
others had done this, and will continue to do this, better than I. I
felt that I had two new
contributions to make: that I could competently produce a contemporary
introduction to the
text, exploring rhetorical issues raised by the work of the "new
historicists," and
that I could produce an electronic edition which, while it might never
be the best text, would
be one of the earliest Renaissance English works to appear in the new
medium, useful to
students all over the world who might not otherwise have access to it
in paper form. I believe those aims were achieved, as I have received
electronic mail from students (and
scholars!) in many countries who seem glad to have had access to this
and some fifteen other
texts (Bear) that I have similarly produced.

Not everyone is happy to see texts like "may.txt" appear on the
Internet.
Periodically a thread of heated discussion erupts in online seminars
such as HUMANIST or
SHAKSPER as to whether such texts are "useful" editions. The gist of
the
academic community's objections is that effort should be expended
primarily on work
produced in circumstances like those of peer-review in academic
journals, i.e. on
"authorized" editions for which they themselves will do the
authorizing, the
primary use of which will be for scholarly analysis. Even granting this
authority, however,
will not prevent the appearance of editions aimed at being read, and as
a wider readership
tends to require a more accessible text, this is where design comes
into its own.

"May.txt" actually is constructed a bit like an MLA-style term
paper, with a general
title, note on the text, introduction, text, notes, and bibliography,
in sequential order. As it is
an electronic text, it is searchable, downloadable, printable, and
readable, but its readability
(with the exception of its being readable by speech software for the
vision-impaired) is its
weakness. Scrolls were replaced by codex books, beginning about AD 400 (Manguel 127), at least in part because they were
accessible only
sequentially. Codex books permit random access, so that a reader may
readily consult a
particular passage[2]. The text must be made
more accessible and
attractive.

The advent of the World Wide Web presented new iconic
possibilities for those who seek to
produce readers' and teaching editions. This was not immediately so (McLaurin). HTML was originally devised with only
one graphic design
model in mind, that of the text outline with nested levels of headers,
which is the model
most familiar to the creators of software manuals. An outline is easily
converted into a
concept map and vice versa, as it is a hierarchical and sequential
linking of concepts. Thus, a
visual flowchart of elements could be reduced to a pre-organized verbal
model for teaching
new users to master a program. This is a powerful paradigm for
information transmission
among the hard and social sciences, as the iconic "page" that appears
onscreen
conveys an impression of a single culture united in a belief in
causation. (Where there is
causation, investigation is possible and results may be tested.) But
users were not satisfied
with a Web consisting of an infinity of links between black-on-gray
"outlines."
Images, which the author of HTML envisioned would be mostly photographs
and charts
exchanged among scientists across the variety of computing platforms in
use, began
immediately to be used as design and even typographic elements. Sensing
an opportunity,
Netscape Corporation (Netscape) in 1994 leaped
ahead of the
committees that had been entrusted with the development of HTML
protocols, and
introduced codes for, among other things, centering of text and font
sizing. Web page
designers seized upon the "unauthorized" codes immediately, and
"unauthorized" texts of classic works began, within months, to clothe
themselves
in the graphic elements of traditional book arts, acquiring the
rhetoric of those arts without,
so to speak, having to pay the dues thereof[3].
Combined with the
hypertextual powers of HTML, the new design elements created a workable
tool for
re-presenting texts in an entertaining and informative
telecommunications environment
that rapidly gained popularity (Ockerbloom).

Figure 5 shows how the "The Lady of May"
responded
to the early design opportunities of HTML. A list of links, or a kind
of interactive table of
contents, whisks the reader to the text-matter of choice: introduction
or main matter or notes
or bibliography. Notation no longer merely refers to notes, but puts
the note onscreen. A click
of the "back" button returns the reader to the context in which the
notation
appeared. Typographic design is now possible, and the ritualistic
richness of the Elizabethan
title is restored in full. The earliest version of this file accepted
the default background color
of the browser (usually gray); it now specifies white (hexadecimal
"#ffffff"), as do
many other "books" in cyberspace (Project Bartleby).
Margins also have been restored, in imitation of the white space around
the text that had
been dictated by printing technology in the days of hand-operated
presses. As a subtle clue that
this is a text transcribed by R.S. Bear, there are additional visual
effects, common to all the
classics I have published: "links" and "visited links" are not
Netscape's default blue and purple, but brown and green, and notes
appear in a dark blue text
color, to differentiate them from the black of the main matter.

As HTML has evolved, more and more formatting control has gone to
the information
provider, with mixed results. Many, new to the idea of access to
publication design, have
based their documents on print advertising and television commercials,
the design of which
reflect millions of dollars spent on research into capturing attention.
"Pages" have
gaudy graphics, with blinking text, animated GIF's (Graphic Interface
Format), tiled
background images, banners, and clashing text colors, often masking the
absence of significant
content. At the other extreme are government documents containing
millions of characters,
with no more structure than numbered chapters, sections, and
paragraphs, all on the same
gray background. Those working with classic texts, however, tend to be
aware of the rhetorical
power of traditional book design, and their ideas on the use of HTML to
translate this power
to the Web are convergent. While I do not have space here to
demonstrate this assertion
exhaustively, I suggest that the reader examine a few texts accessible
from the Books Online Page (Ockerbloom);
Project Bartleby (Project
Bartleby) of the University of Columbia is a particularly fine
instance. Or see an egregiously
obvious instance: Milton against a background of a right-hand book
page, with the actual gutter at
far left (Milton Project)!

Traditional page design is still authoritative because of its
familiarity. The reader, reassured as
to the points of arrival and departure, is free to concentrate on the
matter being
communicated. There are, however, other traditional models besides
those we have
considered up to this point, and some of these might be worth examining
as we consider the
future of etext. Elements of HTML not previously available will make it
possible for notes
and glosses to pop up onscreen when their key, or referent, is clicked
(as a hypertext link). It is
already possible to foreshadow this technique by using "frames"--more
than one
window opened by the browser at one time. Figure 6 shows one way in
which traditional
design and frames can be brought together to create a teaching edition,
with an interactive
sidebar. In figure 6 we are at the point
of arrival. Both the
page title and the HTML header proclaim that centuries-old "title" of
the piece not
found in the original, orienting the modern reader upon arrival. The
paragraphs following
the header explain how to use the notes, introduction, and
bibliography, as well as making
available a non-frames version of the text, for access from older
browsers. I have retained
white as the background color of the main matter, along with the brown
and green links, but
the Notes window has a tan/ivory background and a (very) dark blue text
color, to distinguish
it easily from the main matter.

Much of the information once found at the head of the file,
including text source and
acknowledgements, I have moved into the note that appears when the text
is first accessed.
Other information, including links to my home page and to the Edmund
Spenser Home
Page, the gateways to "The Lady of May," I have moved to the bottom of
the file in
the main (left) window, as newly arriving readers are apt to click on
these, leaving the frames
environment abruptly and becoming disoriented[4].
The aim here is to
make a variety of reading and study strategies available to the reader
without unduly
distracting from the narrative continuity of the text, an aim that
echoes that of the modern
pedagogical codex textbook.

Figure 6 serves as our point of
departure from this present
narrative, presenting an edition of "The Lady of May" separated by four
centuries
of technology and editorship from the first edition, yet retaining an
iconic likeness that is not
accidental. The rhetoric of arrival, of presence within a text, and of
departure still follows an
ancient law: that of conservation of energy. In social behavior, such
conservation is known by
the name of tradition, and we are not unwise when we pack our
traditions with our other
belongings when seeking out new lands.

1. Prometheus, the popular
symbol of the artist working alone, steals
fire from the gods and is punished, but this theft is undertaken on
behalf of his people, and is
a social act.

2. May.txt permits this
also, but as members of my audience at two
lectures on the Internet which I gave for the Oregon Humanities Center
in the early nineties
assured me, many potential readers will be put off by the steepness of
the learning curve in
becoming comfortable with their software's capabilities. They will tend
to "page
down" interminably through the Introduction (which is as long as the
text itself!),
thinking all the while that the only way to read this pageant
is to get a copy from the
library and curl up with it in front of a fire.

3. I am aware that there
is no inherent virtue in "samizdat" publishing of classic liturature;
my own first outing, probably still available in a few places as
"ballads.txt," was a disaster of poor proofreading, and
I was rightly taken to task in a number of postings to scholarly lists
for releasing it in such
condition. With freedom comes responsibility, and the publisher must
rise to the
occasion or leave well enough alone!

4. These changes were
suggested by beta testers of the file, who
responded to a request for participation posted on three Internet
discussion groups (also
known, somewhat inaccurately, as "listservs"): RENAIS-L, SPENSER-L, and
HUMANIST. Several of the responses are reproduced below:

To: RBEAR@OREGON.UOREGON.EDUSubject: Lady of May I thought that it worked very well. Perhaps a little bit of instruction in the initial notes column might make it easier to use, but this might only be relevant to "cold-calls" on the internet and not affect use by your students. One design suggestion: display the notes in a smaller font. One usability suggestion: provide a consolidated notes file in case students want to download or print the notes (this may be contrary to your goals in the project). As far as using HTML rather than TEI SGML, an SGML purist might look down their nose, but if you ever need the functionality of TEI SGML, it shouldn't be much problem to convert if you've done things well in HTML. Please let me (or the whole list) know how this feedback request worked for you. I've made a synopsis of the five major gospels and might ask for quick reviews in a similar manner.

To: rbear@OREGON.UOREGON.EDUSubject: Lady of May/presentation of texts Dear Risa,I've visited your site and feel that this is precisely the kind of material that need to be put up on the Web. From a design point of view though, I would say that you need some kind of visual differentiation between links targeting the "Notes" frame, and links to "unframed" pages. (I DO think that your use of the Notes frame to contain concise supplementary material is very intelligent.) It is a bit disconcerting to click on the first four links: R.S. Bear, University of Oregon, Introduction and Bibliography, and be whisked completely out of the frames environment back to the single page. Solutions?: Target these links to load in the main text frame or (gulp) create a third frame containing the introductory material with its links to unframed pages. The former is probably preferable given most people's visceral reaction against a multiplicity of frames. (Isn't Netscape's frames version of its homepage the worst implementation of frames you ever saw?)

To: rbear@OREGON.UOREGON.EDUSubject: Lady of May Dear Risa -Saw the announcement of Lady of May (your framed version) on Humanist. Terrific - frames are the way to go! But am curious... you talk about comparing print versions; I didn't see that; I presume it is still to come; and will there be two frames with each text version. Wouldn't three columns crowd the screen too much and hamper reading? Good work.

To: RBEAR@OREGON.UOREGON.EDUSubject: Page Design I found the page design to be a very useful adaptation of hypertext design within the limitations of current html standard. In the near future, Windows type help (popups and jumps) will be introduced to Web pages but for now, your design provides for the integration of notes and text.

To: rbear@OREGON.UOREGON.EDUSubject: Lady of May As I recall, you wanted feedback on the site, so this: the text of The Lady of May is beautifully done, but I see no reason at all for the frames, which just sit there occupying almost half the screen. As it stands, the side frames just disrupt the visual pleasure of the screen. The version without frames is much nicer. In short, frames are amusing gadgets and sometimes useful, but I don't see a justification for them on your site.

(This one failed to discover the linkage
between the textual keys and the notes. That is an important clue; and
I plan further clarification in the header to prevent this problem.)